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Evolutionary Determinants of Health and Urban Wellbeing

We
humans weren’t born to live in towns. For most of the last four million years or more, we
and our immediate ancestors survived as hunter-gathers, living off the land in
small tribal societies, working closely with nature.

Culturally, we are adapting to urbanized living:
our technologies, towns, economies and societies have developed at a remarkable
speed. Anatomically, however, we have not evolved at the same electric pace:
genetically, we remain as we were before towns developed, or even before
large-scale farming was adopted some 5,000-10,000 years ago. Our bodies and
brains retain many of the attributes and drives of our ancient ancestors:
autonomically, instinctively, unconsciously and subconsciously they still
impact significantly on our daily lives.

Today’s cities accommodate a globally population of
some 3.4 billion, but towns are not our
natural habitat: there is therefore a profound dichotomy between the world we
currently live in, and the one we were genetically, metabolically,
physiologically and psychologically designed for. We can’t uninvent towns, nor do
we wish to, but town life is, superficially, the very antithesis of the
hunter-gatherers’ world.

Eden Protocol

There is a partial
solution to this problem, however. It lies in the adoption of proxy behaviours,
environments and townscapes that mimic key elements of the nutrition, daily
activity, social interaction and engagement with the natural world that our
minds and bodies demand. Such applied studies have been brought together to
form a coherent protocol applied to 21st-century townscapes and
urban life-styles. We call this approach the Eden Protocol, a short-hand term for the Evolutionary Determinants of health, social interaction and urban
wellbeing. Through its implementation, urban wellbeing will be quantifiably
improved, and the cost of the National Health Service much diminished. The
better our urban and societal surroundings simulate our "natural habitat", the
healthier we urban creatures will be.